Use of CPUs from cloud-based providers is not as efficient for computations as using multiple GPUs linked together on a custom built setup. Using hypervisors instead of barebones for computational work further reduces efficiency by another 10-15%. This is a waste of money, and poorly done systems analysis.

Although an excellent question, this has always been counter-intuitive about Manhattan.

Technically its a worthless piece of land and yet everyone flocks here and keeps pimping up the prices.

This Datacenter would not be going out of business anytime soon, and neither properties that charge $200/sq. ft. The reason is quite simple - proximity to other tech companies makes it a favorable location, and if you don't have to travel through Lincoln or Holland tunnel, then you don't have to waste an hour in traffic. As a CTO/ IT Manager you will likely chose a location that is within minutes of your office or place of residence. Time savings for you will translate into customers offsetting this cost for a faster service and bragging rights. Who wants to see 'our datacenter is in New Jersey'?

An encrypted filesystem with block striped volumes across multiple different providers would be a pretty good protection. Even if they had your key, they only had a partial block of data which is impossible to reconstruct without all of the blocks.

And the 10x the cost is worth every penny. Cisco and Juniper routers and switches are the backbone of many serious enterprises. Serious about security and performance. I don't know of any Chinese product that is worth spending money on.

One of these companies that supposedly promises to launch your 1U CubeSat is charging $125k for 1kg 1U CubeSat, with a 2 year delivery date. And that is to low earth orbit. Price goes up to $250k for geosync orbit, and $490k to gso/low lunar orbit, whatever that means. Meanwhile, back on Earth, actual prices to launch 1kg of mass into space are $10k with most rockets, or $5k with SpaceX. So this article, as well as Wiki entry are essentially advertisement for a crappy, slow product, that costs 25x-100x more than what the actual price is. And people wonder why we haven't gotten to Mars yet.

This is not new 'science' that was just discovered. It has been known and taught in Childhood Psychology classes for decades. It is always amazing how these psychology professors venture out into studying a little bit of mathematics and statistics and decide to publish papers on the obvious, padding their resumes and shuffling papers around. You never hear about something really new and groundbreaking from University of Western Ontario, and this is not an exception.

What do you people think the Internet is? Its mostly a collection of Cisco routers and switches. Don't fool yourself if you think its this living breathing emergent organism that has evolved because of open source and Linux and all the techno weenie coders and packet kiddies circle jerking each other on IRC all night long. Its a network evolved BY corporations FOR corporations. The only difference is that they didn't have to pay royalties to any university for the idea.

Fax is patented and it is still used today worldwide and is unlikely to go away. What is so wrong with Coke and Pepsi? McDonalds and Burger King? All these are proprietary, patented products, that have created a market and inspired competition FOR that market share. If Internet was a commercial entity, then perhaps we would have faster expansion of various networks trying to compete with one another for the customers. Since there is a free networking standard, Cisco still managed to monopolize it, so did Microsoft and any other company. And what did they contribute to the basic research? Very little compared to what would've been contributed by a nonprofit entity.

And he is absolutely right. If Internet was patented by the Universities, today we would have more money centered around basic research and development. We would still have businesses competing to create an alternative and perhaps yield a better standard than HTML. Ultimately the price level and innovation are correlated and depend on consumer demand.